“Despite the understandable criticism of curators' travel plans, I still find it essential to spend time with artists, whose work is necessarily and irrevocably connected to their place of work, and to learn in situ from curators, collections and galleries. It is an incredible privilege to be able to do this with the help of those who know much more than me.”[1]

“The critique of the author/curator risks hindering much-needed experimentation and exploration of new forms of display within the museum, new approaches that undoubtable require authorship and a rethinking of the contextualization of art. We eulogize the great achievements of radical experimentation such as Documenta V—for which Harald Szeemann brought together many of what we forget that they were seminal figures of the time in a 100 Day Event –but we forget that they were similarly attacked by the artists in the exhibition for encroaching on their artistic independence. And what would a non-authorial curator look like? I certainly don’t care to know.”[2]

Exhibitions:10th Gwangju Biennale 5 September - 9 November 2014 Gwangju, Republic of Korea The 10th Gwangju Biennale titled Burning down the house (after the 1983 song by Talking Heads) took the symbol of a burning house; and the concept of one burning down their own house in protest. The biennale showcased many artworks related to protest and celebration, critique and reconciliation.(Teasdale 2014)[3] “I was thinking about the relationship to recent history and, in Korea in particular, the very violent way in which there has been a forward movement of development and production in society,” Ms. Morgan said in a telephone interview from Gwangju. (Qin September 16 2014)[4]. The location of the Biennale, Gwangju, has a somber history of violence and suppression. The Gwangju Biennale was first established in commemoration of the Gwangju Massacre (May 18, 1980) in which hundreds of civilians were killed by the state army. (McGarry 2014). Morgan’s choice to highlight political activism proved to be courageous; only a few weeks before the opening of the biennale news broke of censorship of a different show that marked the 20th anniversary of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. Officials from the city government banned a satire painting depicting Park Geun-hye, the current South Korean president, which led to the resignation of the Biennale Foundation’s president, Lee Yong-woo, as well as the show’s chief curator, Yun Beom-mo.[5]

The biennale was a diverse and uncommonly aggressive exhibition that included artists from Asia, the West, and the South – essentially all over. A refreshingly global take on a show that still attracts mostly Korean visitors (S.C.S.) is broken into five gallery presentations, the artworks ranged from being tributes to lost souls, and geopolitical statements, to poignant, and commemorative personal testimonials. Many of the works challenged political history and held a quality of what organizers call the “Gwangju spirit,” an activist element that has underpinned the city’s identity since 1980. Even though the 103 artists ranged geographically from 38 countries (Qin September 16 2014), the artworks underscored the universality of darkness across cultures (McGarry 2014). For the opening Minouk Lim from South Korea staged a performance outside the hall which included two grey shipping containers that held the remains of several Korean War victims, which were discovered in a mine in 2009. The children of these victims carried the remains from an ambulance to the containers, blindfolded and guided by the parents of those who had died in the Gwangju uprising. Funeral rites were then performed for the first time. (S.C.S. 2014).

Morgan also proved to be provocative in her practice by abandoning contemporary art’s familiar white-cube surroundings. (S.C.S. 2014)[6] One of her boldest moves was to cover all the gallery walls with graphic vinyl wallpaper by the London design firm El Último Grito. The wallpaper appeared to be a repetition of hazy grey smoke; but upon closer investigation, one could see an array raster dots; a 360-degree Lichtenstein. (Farago 2014)[7]

The first room included a video and slide installation that documented early performances by Lee Bul in the late 1980s and early ‘90s of her disrupting the streets of Korea and Japan. One especially subversive piece, Abortion (1989) shows Bul suspended upside down, naked, and reciting a monologue. Giving prominence to two female South Korean artists was clearly intentional for Morgan, as she has in previous exhibitions highlighted strong and deserving female artists that are not commonly featured on the American-Europe Museum track.

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s The Incidental Insurgents: The Part about The Bandits (2013), an effective film by Ramallah-based artists, a dense and immersive layering of searching political storylines, took on poignancy in the light of recent events in the Middle East. Among other artists one found the work of Camille Henrot (found items dipped in tar), Cornelia Parker (shards of burnt trees), Anna Maria Maiolino (carefully wrought clay), and Gabriel Orozco (randomly cast clay) displayed together as sets of shapeless black objects. Gathering these four, each of which touches on repetition and seriality to begin with, seemed to symbolically underscore the inevitability of history repeating itself across cultures (France, England, Brazil, Mexico, shown in Korea). It’s one of the more ineffable applications of the Biennale’s importance[8]

Saloua Raouda Choucair. 16 April – 20th October 2013 Tate Modern, London, UK. This was the first major museum exhibition of Saloua Raouda Choucair; a Lebanese pioneer of abstract art in the Middle East who was never previously exhibited outside of Lebanon. The retrospective showcased Choucair’s work made over the past 50 years, reflecting her interests in science, mathematics, poetry, Islamic art, and Western modernism. (Morgan, 2013)[9]

When Jessica Morgan discovered Chaucair in 2009 she was 93-years-old and had stopped her work, which had started to slow about a decade earlier with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease (Siegalmay, 2013)[10] Morgan, who knew little, if anything, about Choucair at the time, said: "I came across her work by happenstance when I was in Beirut visiting a gallery and on a shelf was this quite remarkable sculpture. I went to her apartment, which was an incredible experience because everything—her work from the last five or six decades—was there." (Holledge, 2013)[11] Western museums are powerfully attached to the status quo; they do not deal in experiments or unheard-of-artists. Despite the museum’s conservative nature, Jessica Morgan spearheaded a devoted solo show, for the first time in Tate Modern's 13-year history, of an artist who can confidently be described as previously completely unknown in Britain. (Cumming, 2013)[12]

The exhibition brought together more than 100 of Choucair’s paintings and sculptures made with a technique that used a combination of mathematics, science and architecture. Choucair would divide her paintings, and her sculptures alike, into squares, halving and quartering before working. (Holledge, 2013)[13] The exhibition was carefully arranged over four rooms; bright and abstract gouache nude figure compositions hung in the first room, as well as a two early sculptures titled Trajectory of a Line. Sculptures filled the second room,small pieces in wood, fibreglass or stone were displayed on a long bench with gouaches displayed on the wall behind. In the third room there was a large cabinet showcasing groupings of even smaller sculptures in terracotta, white wood, or brass clasping aluminum. (Lambirth, 2013)[14]

Choucair studied architecture and design of Egypt in 1943 where she considered the notion of the abstract in Islamic art. When she arrived in Paris five years later, and started working in Fernand Léger's Parisian atelier, she took the notion with her. Her Poem sculptural series reflects a contemporary experimental stance, made from multiple parts that can be taken apart and re-arranged. "It is not a monolithic sculpture," says Morgan. "It can be re-interpreted by the viewer who is given an active role." The series was partly inspired by Sufi poetry in which every stanza can stand alone, as well as a whole. (Akbar, 2013)[15]

Morgan steps outside of the usual museum unsaid guidelines again, and displays damaged artworks that are usually hidden in the basement, rather than on display. A number of the paintings and wooden objects are slightly scruffy, knocked about a bit, not the usual perfectly presented modernist masterworks — as if to remind us that they come from what has been, after all, a war zone. (Lambirth, 2013)[16] As part of her practice, Morgan views herself in a larger context, being a curator beyond the typical museum format.

Morgan says that while Choucair was incredibly prolific over her long career, her work was not sold. Several factors that helped keep Choucair in the shadows. “She’s a woman, that was a large part of it,” she said. “She is also Druze,” she added, referring to the tribal sect that emerged in the 11th century, merging strains of Ismaili Shiite Islam and pre-Islamic theologies. (Siegalmay, 2013)[17]

"No one was interested in acquiring it. She knew she was good. She has spent a whole life saying, 'When are they coming?'" The purpose of this show is not to right that wrong, she concludes, but to place her in her "rightful position as a significant figure in the history of 20th century art". (Akbar, 2013)[18]

The World as a Stage24 October 2007 – 1 January 2008. Tate Modern, London, UK. This exhibition was framed as a play, divided into several acts that took place over a number of months and in a variety of locations; in and outside the Tate modern. It was inspired in part by its location –London – and the city’s theatrical tradition, as well as by Tate Modern’s proximity to the Globe Theatre. The show’s title paraphrases Shakespeare’s famous ‘All the world’s a stage’ monologue from ‘As You Like It’.

The World as a Stage brought together a significant number of young, and international artists including many Americans because the exhibit traveled to America. (Cumming, 2007)[19] It engaged with experimental theatre practices as the ‘theater’. In diverse ways, the works challenge the logic of modernism through altering methods of space and time perception. (Woods, 2007)[20]. The World as a Stage demonstrated how gallery spaces can, and have in recent years, been used for performance spaces that rely on audience participation to exist. (Fox, 2008)[21] Jessica Morgan states, “Within the exhibition, different tropes of theater – backstage, front-of-house, actors, props and audience –are placed in a dialectical relationship to the customs of art and exhibition making so that the two realms speak about or occasionally against each other.” (Morgan, 2007)[22]. The gallery turned into a stage in which the audience’s role shifted between being an audience and at times a performer.

Pulse: Art, Healing, and TransformationMay 14 – August 31, 2003 Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston The exhibition dealt with the idea of healing in contemporary art through processes of ritual, repetition, and movement. It is considered by the ICA as the first major study of the relationship art and therapy. (Morgan, Pulse, 2003)[23]

The main figures of this show were Joseph Beuys and Lygia Clark who both envision art activity that can be performed collectively by the masses and have paved the way for a varied cast of artists in this kind of practice (Cotter, Holland, 2003)[24]. Clark’s approach to healing was in the therapeutic handling of objects that were made from movable parts which did not become active until they were in contact with the part of the body that discovered them, and were used to reawaken the senses. These relational objects defied the idea of institutionalized museums that are usually against touching art. (Davila, 2003)[25] Beuys’ work, and more specifically, his sculptures are cryptic in nature; complex in their repetitive symbolism, and concepts. It is not uncommon for Morgan to be courageous in her practice; using Beuys and Clark as a launching point for the exhibit was a daring proposition. Morgan’s ambition to locate other artists whose work might compare to the work of Clark and Beuys was steep. Her success lies in presenting a range of well-known international artists, with concerns of healing, and incorporates a comparable mixture of media.

Among the artists was Felix González-Torres, whose perpetually replenished piles of candy are examples of using art almost as therapy for the artist in dealing with the loss of his lover. ''A Stitch in Time'' is a kind of communal quilting, by the London-based David Medallan, a pleasurable sharing activity as visitors were invited to sew personally significant texts onto a large piece of cloth suspended in the gallery. The New York artist Hannah Wilke (1940-1993) used photographic self-portraits to come to terms with the cancer that killed her. Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang created another interactive installation A Cure When Ill, a Supplement When Healthy where the audience is invited to walk barefoot across a pathway of smooth stone, and a reflexology chart drawn in gunpowder and ink hangs on the wall beside it. The installation also included a vending machine dispensing herbal tonics (Cotter, Holland, 2003).[26] “Brave in its quest and rightfully praised for that audacity, this exhibit lends many means of transcendence with all of the required gravity and grace.” (D'lynne, 2003)[27]

Schooling & Employment Jessica Morgan earned her BA and anMAin Art History from Cambridge University in 1990, she also received a second MAin Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, in London in 1992. She is a Mellon Fellow at the Yale Centre for British Art from Yale University as well as Contemporary Art Curatorial Fellow at The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.[29]

She is currently the Director of Dia Art Foundation, New York, beginning from 2015.[30] She began working as an assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art and became the Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, in 1998.[31] In 2002, she moved to the UK and became a curator for the Tate Modern; she was appointed as the Daskalopoulos Curator of International Art in 2010 until her recent transition to the Dia Art Foundation.Further reading:Morgan, Jessica. “Intercontinental Drift: Jessica Morgan on Global Pop”Artforum International, Feb 2013, Vol. 51, No. 6 , February 2013

WHAT ARE CURATOR CARDS?

These Curator Cards began in Maryland Institute College of Art's inaugural Curatorial Practice MFA as a project for Interdisciplinary Approaches to Curatorial Practice (IACP) taught by Marcus Civin. This class focuses on revealing the history of curatorial practice by analyzing influential curators and exhibitions. The curator cards continue...

Together, a mix of students choose curators that spark their interest and create Curator Cards based on their research.

Please note that all of this information is strictly for educational purposes. If there are any additions, comments or concerns please contact us.